Felix Krawatzek

(BA, MA, MSc, DPhil)

Room 140, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Manor Road, Oxford. OX1 3UQ

I am a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2015-2018) based at the University of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations and a Research Fellow at Nuffield College. I finished my DPhil in 2015 after studies at the University of Kent (BA), the Institut d’Études Politiques in Lille (MA) and the University of Oxford (MSc). I was a visiting fellow at Sciences Po Paris (Centre d’études et de recherches internationales) in 2012-13.

My research is situated at the intersection between social sciences and humanities. Methodologically, I am interested in comparative historical analysis, qualitative methods in the social sciences, and content analysis/discourse network analysis. Substantively, my current academic interests revolve around governance of and ideas about the future in a comparative perspective. During my doctorate I studied the role of youth for understanding moments of regime crisis, and I have a long-standing interest in questions related to collective memory in particular in the European context. I am also involved in a larger project studying migrants’ remittances in a historical perspective.

My DPhil thesis explores the meaning of “youth” and the political mobilisation of young people in key moments of crisis in Europe. I start with analysing the critical role of youth for the consolidation of the authoritarian regime structures in Russia between 2005 and 2011. Russia’s authoritarian turn included the restructuring of the discourse about youth, the physical mobilisation of young people, and the isolation of oppositional youth. How valid are these findings for regime crises more generally? I explore this question through an analysis of the breakdown of the authoritarian Soviet Union during perestroika, the breakdown of unconsolidated democracy during the last years of the Weimar Republic, and the crisis of the democratic regime in France around 1968. The cross-regional and cross-temporal comparison of these episodes demonstrates that regimes lacking popular democratic support compensate for their insufficient legitimacy by trying to mobilise youth symbolically and politically.

I have been involved in a Leverhulme project about the political impact of migrants led by Professor Gwendolyn Sasse at the University of Oxford. We are jointly analysing, as one part of this project, a unique collection of 6,000 digitised letters sent from German migrants to the US during the 19th and 20th centuries. This research adds to questions of transnational diffusion and process involved in cultural assimilation over time. The systematic analysis of this large corpus permits precise empirical and new conceptual insights into the physical circulation of people and the travel of political, economic, and cultural ideals between differing political systems.

As part of an interdisciplinary research group of four (former) PhD students (Gregor Feindt, Daniela Mehler, Friedemann Pestel, and Rieke Trimçev), I have been involved in studying European memory. We were awarded two research grants for its realisation. This was the first such funding the Bielefeld-based “Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies” granted to doctoral students and allowed organising two international conferences on the Europeanisation of narratives of the past. We developed a theory and method of “entangled memory” which unites calls for a “third wave” in memory studies and is published in “History and Theory”.